In 1873, John Hunton and his oil prospecting party were driven off by a mounted band of Arapahoe Indians while filling glass jars with pure crude oil seeping from sandy ground, the first recorded oil prospecting incident in the present-day Salt Creek Oil Field. In 1889, a well producing five to ten barrels a day launched Wyoming’s first oil boom. By the early 1920’s, the approximately 20,000-acre Salt Creek Field had become a virtual oil derrick forest, producing more oil than any other field in the U.S. at the time and helping earn Casper the title “Oil Capitol of the Rockies.” Workers from around the world poured in, and boom towns such as Salt Creek, Lavoye, and Snyder sprang up, where roughnecks worked and played hard, fueled by moonshine made in stills hidden in nearby rim rocks. Today, only Midwest and Edgerton survive. The promise of wealth from black gold also fed one of the nation’s most infamous scandals of the 1920s: in 1921, President Warren G Harding shifted supervision of oil reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior, after which Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall leased the Teapot Dome reserve south of Salt Creek to Harry F. Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company without competitive bidding. Investigations and prosecutions brought the resignations of Fall and the Secretary of the Navy, cancellation of the lease, prison terms for Fall and Sinclair, and, after years of court battles, a U.S. Supreme Court decision voiding the Mammoth Oil lease and returning Teapot Dome to Navy supervision.